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The offer by needle and syringe manufacturers to voluntarily cap trade margins at 75 per cent after meeting with the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority apparently validates the view that without the actionable threat of price control, the healthcare sector cannot be trusted to self-regulate.

“The NPPA advised manufacturers to consider regulating price themselves; otherwise, the government would be forced to take steps as they have done to cap prices in the past for items like stents and orthopaedic implants,” reported the newspaper Mint quoting a person aware of the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity.

I asked, Rajiv Nath, President, AISNMA, the association of homegrown manufacturers that made this offer, in an e-mail : why wait for an NPPA ultimatum? If a cap was implementable, why not just go ahead and do it? I have published responses to these and other queries in their entirety in the interest of clarity. But before that, my take based on these responses and the media coverage on the issue. Continue reading →

Correct me if I am wrong but I do believe that the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare just acknowledged that when prices of a product are fixed, manufacturers are discouraged from entering the market. And that competition brings down prices. Yes, you read that right, competition, and not price control. Continue reading →

In 2015, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon convened a High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines. Its charge was to recommend solutions to the fallaciously described “policy incoherence between the justifiable rights of inventors, international human rights law, trade rules and public health in the context of health technologies.” Unfortunately, their starting point was misguided, and – not surprisingly – the resulting report is dangerous nonsense. Continue reading →

Last June, I wrote about the burgeoning online pharmacy business on this blog.

Taking off on a column that I had authored for the Indian Express, I pointed out that while India’s regulation of brick-and-mortar pharmacies (or chemist shops) has been slack, online pharmacies would be held to higher standards. That in the absence of a clear-cut legal pathway for online pharmacies to follow, friction with regulators could not be ruled out. And that these uncertainties would adversely impact e-pharmacies’ ability to raise funds from investors.

At a recent event organised by the Indian Internet Pharmacy Association (IIPA), it became clear that all this and more had come to fruition.

What intrigued me is that the e-pharmacy’s enemy number one appears to be India’s foremost chemist association AIOCD. IIPA members allege that they have had to endure regulatory harassment triggered by complaints from AIOCD members. These complaints have led to police investigations, regulatory raids, and the cancellation of licences of chemist shops supplying Internet pharmacies culminating in the IIPA openly accusing AIOCD members of instigating the administration to launch unnecessary probes against them. And of pressuring those chemists who do supply e-pharmacies to back off. Continue reading →

Clinical trials, that hot-button subject hogging headlines up until a year ago, appears to have quietly slipped into the realm of business-as-usual. However, there are still some knotty issues to be resolved. Chief among them is the oversight of Ethics Committees (ECs) as was evident at a recent event I attended.

ECs – which are a mix of experts and lay persons – are the gatekeepers of ethics within their institutions. Just as a strong EC can blow the whistle on unethical behaviour, a weak or careless one might inadvertently abet it. Continue reading →

On Friday, May 13, India committed close to a million dollars to help create a benchmark document for training and practice of Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathic medicine. It is indeed a significant commitment and the reinforcement of ongoing efforts by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to promote traditional health systems strengthening around the world.

What started with the Delhi declaration in 2012-13, with a consortium of South-East Asian countries is now slowly growing into an international collaboration. The Indian government used a country-by-country approach to sign bilateral agreements, starting with information centres in Mexico, Nepal, Malaysia, Russia among others. Continue reading →

Last week, the Indian Express published my column on the urgent need for hospitals – big and small – to follow infection control norms. Click here to read.

While researching the column, I spoke to officials at the National Board for Accreditation of Hospitals and Healthcare Providers (NABH) to understand how the issue might be addressed. While hospital-acquired/associated infections (HAIs) have been a concern for some years now, the spectre of drug resistance makes addressing their occurrence that much more of an imperative. For that, hospitals need to take infection control seriously.

NABH, as its name suggests, sets up and operates accreditation programmes around quality-of-care at Indian hospitals. One of the things that piqued my interest was Safe-I, a handholding programme for hospitals, that is focused on infection control. Since 2012, NABH runs this in partnership with the healthcare company Becton Dickinson. Safe-I hopes to eventually become a robust source of HAI data through a network of participating hospitals. Excerpts from an e-mail interaction with NABH CEO Dr K K Kalra. Continue reading →

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) recently slapped a Rs 63.5 crore fine collectively on GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals (GSK) and Sanofi Pasteur for attempting to collude to share a Union Ministry of Health tender for a meningitis vaccine and inflate prices. Indian health authorities have been immunising Indians performing Hajj, or the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, against meningitis since 2002. The case, which dates back to 2011, appears to be a great lesson in how not to tender.

What should’ve been a straightforward process for a single product with the same three suppliers year after year, took on the appearance of a farce with the tender being floated thrice over, more than one lawsuit, a disgruntled local producer and two vilified multinationals protesting their innocence. And to top it all, the guilt or lack of it of the Union Ministry of Health appears still open to question. Continue reading →

A recent article in the Indian Express reported statistics from India’s National Health Mission to highlight what it called “a debilitating shortage” of health specialists in the country. In doing so, it only reaffirmed what several experts, committees, and policy wonks have said all along: India needs more doctors.

For the longest time, India’s healthcare problem has been defined as one of numbers. Doctor demand outstrips supply, we are told. The accent has been on creating supply (predominantly in the private sector) to address this perceived shortage. I use the word “perceived” because the problem does not lie in numbers alone. What India faces is a full-blown leadership crisis caused by the systematic undermining of primary care physicians and the disproportionate clout wielded by super specialists in medical regulation against the backdrop of a lacklustre public health system. Continue reading →

The media, it appears, cannot have enough of Dilip Shanghvi, the 60-year old founder and controlling stakeholder of Sun Pharmaceutical Industries. That’s not surprising if you consider that on March 4 he overtook Mukesh Ambani, the second-generation oil-to-telecoms tycoon and arguably India’s most influential businessman, to become the richest Indian.

Of course, just because Shanghvi went from number two to number one among wealthy Indians that day does not suddenly make him a new-improved version of himself nor does it throw up hitherto unknown facets of his personality (unless you go dig really deep and if you want to do that why wait for him to grow a shade wealthier, right?)

What it does, however, is generate curiosity. So when Outlook magazine reached out, my job was cut out for me. Here’s the link. Alternatively, you can click here and here for the PDF documents of the story as it appeared in the magazine, since the web edition seems to be missing some stuff.

The headline is not mine – as far as I am concerned, this ‘Sun’ arrived a while ago.

As an aside, this is the second time I’ve been warned by a commissioning editor to keep it simple. Do not badger the unsuspecting reader with big drug names, I was told categorically. (Seriously, I must be a pretentious bore). So I haven’t. That does not mean Shanghvi’s Sun Pharma does not make them. Try saying levetiracetam five times over without tripping over your tongue. Why? Because that barely pronounceable drug is one the reasons he upstaged Ambani.